While international markets have more volatility and lower trust, their biggest advantage is inefficiency. Many basic services are underdeveloped, creating enormous 'low-hanging fruit' opportunities. Providing a great, reliable service in a market where few things work well can create immense and durable value.

By launching in Rwanda, Zipline was forced to engineer its drones for some of the world's most volatile weather. This real-world hardening created a more robust system and provided invaluable safety data that proved critical for gaining regulatory trust and expanding into the U.S. market.

Zipline initially planned to deliver all medical products. Rwanda's Minister of Health demanded they "just do blood," a product with acute logistical challenges. This customer-enforced focus on a single, high-stakes problem was critical to their initial market validation and success.

After a failed European expansion, Bolt rejected conventional VC advice to target the US or Western Europe. Instead, they built a data model in Excel, ranking global cities by metrics like unemployment and car ownership. This led them to Africa, a non-obvious but highly successful market that became over 50% of their business in six months.

For founders in emerging markets like Africa, the most valuable asset from a community is not capital but access to good product judgment, taste, and peers. This cultivates the ability to create globally meaningful products where established tech ecosystems don't exist.

Zipline's CEO Keller Rinaudo Cliffton reveals their service's profound public health impact. By providing rapid, on-demand delivery of blood transfusions to remote hospitals, the autonomous system directly addressed a leading cause of maternal death, proving robotics can solve critical global issues.

Zipline's original product was a robotics platform that failed to gain traction. Their 'Capital P Pivot' was to medical drone delivery, starting in Rwanda due to US regulations. The strategy was to build a strong safety record abroad to eventually earn the right to operate in the US.

Faced with complex U.S. regulations, Sure's founder went to South Africa. He leveraged its single-regulator system and his personal roots to land his first insurance partner. This validation then served as crucial social proof to sign the same company's U.S. division, de-risking a much larger market entry.

After a disastrous London launch was shut down in 72 hours for bypassing regulators, Bolt learned a critical lesson. Their 'move fast' approach from low-regulation markets didn't work everywhere. This failure forced them to create a dual strategy: optimizing for speed in some countries and for risk mitigation and compliance in others.